1. Field of the Invention
The present invention, which relates to a method and system for providing content-aware persistent advertisements, comprises the steps of extracting and collecting VDNA (Video DNA) fingerprints of media contents playing on various network-enabled terminals including internet browsers, mobile devices, tablets, smart televisions (TVs) and so on, sending the extracted fingerprints along with other information such as metadata, user's location, etc, to the content identification server via internet or mobile networks, and selecting accurate advertisements according to the media content and relevant information, then finally push the advertisements back to user's terminal. Specifically, the present invention relates to facilitating content-aware persistent advertisements.
2. Description of the Related Art
The internet has become an ongoing emerging source that tends to expand more and more. The growth of this particular media attracts the attention of advertisers as a more productive source to bring in consumers. A clear advantage a consumer has with online advertisements is that he or she has control over the item, choosing whether to check it out or not. Online advertisements also can offer various forms of animation. In its most common use, the term online advertising comprises all sorts of banner advertisement, e-mail advertising, in game advertising, and keyword advertising, on many social network platforms, which have received increased relevance. Web related advertising has a variety of sites to publicize and reach a niche audience to focus its attention to a specific group. Research has proven that online advertising has given results and has growing business revenue.
Deploying online advertisements along with various contents including video, audio, images or texts, is a crucial strategy for content owners to realize monetization on their contents. Online advertisements are seen very often on websites, free applications, online videos, etc. on terminals such as PCs (personal computers), smart TVs, mobile devices or tablets. There are several common ways in which online advertising is purchased: CPM (Cost Per Mile), CPC (Cost Per Click), and CPA (Cost Per Action). Content owners apply these revenue models along with the contents they possess.
Nowadays examples of online advertising include contextual advertising on search engine results pages, banner ads, rich media ads, social network advertising, and so on, wherein contextual can be 1) text context, which is mostly used at present, advertisement engines uses keywords of the contents or the application or websites containing the contents to determine appropriate advertisements, 2) metadata of the content, such as title, author, publish date of contents like videos, albums, 3) location context, some applications or websites are able to acquire users' location information, therefore the advertisements they deploy can be location aware.
Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. The advertisements themselves are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed to the user. A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on what the user is viewing. The advertisements may be displayed on the webpage or as pop-up ads. Contextual advertising is also used by search engines to display advertisements on their search results pages based on the keywords in the user's query. Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad is in direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing. Contextual advertising is also called “In-Text” advertising or “In-Context” technology. Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites. Because the advertisements are more targeted, they are more likely to be clicked, thus generating revenue for the owner of the website (and the server of the advertisement). There are several advertising agencies that help brands understand how contextual advertising options affect their advertising plans. There are three main components to online advertising:                1) creation—what the advertisement looks like        2) media planning—where the advertisements are to be run        3) media buying—how the advertisements are paid for        
Contextual advertising replaces the media planning component. Instead of humans choosing placement options, that function is replaced with computers facilitating the placement across thousands of websites.
However, there are some disadvantages on the current methods of contextual advertisements: 1) the context information or the metadata of the content are usually not verified by content owner, they are mostly edited by the website or application which distribute the content, therefore it is possible that the advertisements chosen for the content based on the contextual information are not relevant to the content or not desired by content owners; 2) automatic delivery of content-aware advertisements are not possible; 3) the current method of advertisement distribution does not combine all retrievable information to select most accurate and user prone ads; 4) such methods cannot select accurate advertisements for terminal devices when they are playing contents like videos or audios, because those contents playing on terminal devices, whether they are online or locally saved, provide limited metadata or information. Moreover, the advertisements displaying on different terminal devices are now-independent; it is not possible for content providers or advertising agents to apply proper business rules on those advertisements, wherein the business rules, for example, could be displaying a serial of advertisements for the same media contents playing on different devices. There are not feasible in the current methods of contextual advertisements to determine accurately the media contents showing on the screens of different devices and to select proper advertisements according to predefined business rules.
Ways to automatically identify the contents which users are watching on various terminals, and choose accurate online advertisements are hence desirable, so that no or few human operations are involved in the whole process. With the help of a mature media fingerprinting technology, given required content and metadata from content owners and users, the system is able to identify any number or format of media contents, and push the most accurate advertisements which content owners and users desire.
All these and other introductions of the present invention will become much clear when the drawings as well as the detailed descriptions are taken into consideration.